Biography

The themes of Nick Brandt (British, b. 1964) relate to the disappearing natural world, rapidly changing and vanishing at the hands of mankind.

From 2001 to 2018, he has photographed in Africa. In his celebrated trilogy, On This Earth, A Shadow Falls Across The Ravaged Land (2001-2012), he established a style of portrait photography of animals in the wild similar to that of the photography of humans in studio settings. Shot on medium format film, these series portray animals as sentient creatures not so different from us.

In Inherit the Dust (2016), a series of epic panoramas, Brandt recorded the impact of man in places where animals used to roam but no longer do. In each location, Brandt erected a life-size panel of one of his unreleased animal portrait photographs, placing the displaced animals on sites of explosive urban development, new factories, wastelands and quarries. Vicki Goldberg, the photography critic, wrote:

“Brandt's astonishing panoramas... are a jolting combination of beauty, decay, and admonishment.The result is an eloquent and complex "J'accuse", for the people are as victimized by "development" as the animals are.The breadth, detail, and incongruity of Brandt's panoramas suggest a collision between Bruegel and an apocalypse in waiting."

This Empty World (2019) addresses the escalating destruction of the natural world at the hands of humans, showing a world where, overwhelmed by runaway development, there is no longer space for animals to survive. Working in color for the first time, in visually complex tableaux populated by both humans and animals, This Empty World is both a technical tour de force of contemporary image making and an ambitiously scaled project that uses constructed sets on a scale typically seen in major film productions.

Brandt has had solo gallery and museum shows around the world, including New York, London, Berlin, Stockholm, Paris and Los Angeles. Inherit the Dust most recently has been exhibited at Multimedia Museum of Art in Moscow and the National Museum of Finland in Helsinki. Born and raised in England, Brandt now lives in the southern Californian mountains. He is co-founder of Big Life Foundation, fighting to protect the animals of a large area of Kenya and Tanzania.

Publications

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Since 2005, Brandt has published six books on the theme of vanishing wildlife and has been the subject of many solo exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world. In 2010, Brandt took his work further by helping to launch the Big Life Foundation, a nonprofit conservation organization that enlists over 200 local rangers to protect 1.6 million acres in Kenya and Tanzania.

His new book, This Empty World, visualizes the landscapes of East Africa as places of extreme environmental stress, where wild beasts roam the industrialized and polluted lands that were once theirs. Each picture is meticulously blended from two original images, each shot on the exact same spot weeks apart — the results are a surreal and haunting vision of Earth's wild past and the dark future we may be heading toward if nothing changes.

Poaching in southern Kenya is largely under control now, thanks to the numbers of rangers in place, but there is a bigger issue these days: the invasion of humankind into the wildlife habitat and the conflict that ensues. There is only so much space for people and animals to coexist. That is what I wanted to depict in This Empty World, my series of shots taken in southern Kenya in 2017.

Each work is a composite of two images: the animals photographed first and the humans second, shot weeks apart. We worked on Maasai community ranchland, near Amboseli National Park. I needed a location that had both wildlife habitat and unprotected land inhabited by people. I also wanted it to be extremely denuded, due to overgrazing: the dust was important from an aesthetic point of view.

"Combining the animals and development into one frame, photographed weeks apart on the same spot, was for me symbolic of this invasion of the remaining natural wilderness by humans, as the animals are wiped out in the rapidly decreasing number of places they can live. However, it was also important to show that the people in these photos are not the aggressors, that they too are victims of environmental degradation, and that it is generally the rural poor that suffer the most from environmental destruction."

In 2010, photographer Nick Brandt, conservationist Richard Bonham, and entrepreneur Tom Hill founded the Big Life Foundation with the ambitious goal of ridding East Africa of animal poaching. Today, the nonprofit employs hundreds of local Maasai rangers to patrol over 1.6 million acres of wilderness in the Amboseli-Tsavo-Kilimanjaro ecosystem. The program has been remarkably successful—between 2007 and 2014, around 96 elephants a year were killed for their ivory in southern Kenya alone; between 2014 and 2017, as Big Life's operations scaled up, only two elephants were lost.

Brandt's latest photography series highlights this new threat by appearing to show elephants, rhinos, zebras, and other wildlife strolling through construction sites, bus stops, and other signs of human habitation. Creating the illusion required a Hollywood-scale operation on Maasai land in Kenya, complete with actors, production crews, special effects artists, caterers, and all the other trappings of a film set.

British photographer Nick Brandt started by making music videos for Michael Jackson and Moby, but while filming in East Africa was so struck by the plight of wild animals that he turned his attention to photographing them.

His black-and-white film style, which leans more towards artistic interpretation than documentary, quickly earned him a reputation that has only grown. At auction, prices for a 4.5ft print from 2007 of an elephant drinking reached £87,500 last year.

Now, though, Brandt’s inventive use of technology might just expand his audience in the way that Viola’s adoption of the small screen did.

Nick Brandt’s This Empty World is a bold assault on human greed, capitalism, and consumer culture; this dusky monograph, the artist’s first work in color, digitally merges African fauna with staged urban zones in Kenya.

Brandt sets out with a noble cause: The total number of wild animals on the planet has been rapidly dwindling in the past century, and human development and practices are to blame for this rampant extinction. To reconcile the loss, or to perhaps shed light on the crisis that emerges when humans share borders with threatened species, Brandt compiled images in a two-step process; first, he photographed wild animals (elephants, giraffes, hyenas, lions) in their natural habitats, and later, he instructed his art team to construct intricate and realistic sets of mundane urban buildings like gas stations and construction zones on-site, exactly where the animals were originally photographed. The resulting photographs are surreal, diorama-like configurations in which humans (community members Brandt recruited from nearby towns and cities) and animals tread the same, half-developed, half-wild territory.

London-born photographer Nick Brandt, in his recent collection, Inherit the Dust, tackles tragedy with an epicness, intimacy, and integrity that is bringing the world to its knees, in prayer for the preservation of life itself — the natural world.

Inherit the Dust an exhibition of works by British photographer Nick Brandt is on view at Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow. The selection of works on display features a new project by Brandt. The exhibition contains 19 photographs with titles that reflect disparity such as ‘Factory with chimpanzee’, ‘Quarry with elephant’ and ‘Construction site with rhinos’, among others.

Made, written and narrated by photographer Nick Brandt, he tells the story of the production of the photo series, Inherit the Dust.
The second of two videos written and narrated by Nick Brandt about Inherit the Dust.
Produced by Fotografiska Museum, Stockholm, who held a major exhibition of Inherit The Dust May-September 2016.
Buy the large format book of the series, "Inherit The Dust", on Amazon.

Made, written and narrated by photographer Nick Brandt, he tells the story of the concept behind the photo series, Inherit the Dust.
The first of two videos written and narrated by Nick Brandt about Inherit the Dust.
Produced by Fotografiska Museum, Stockholm, who held a major exhibition of Inherit The Dust May-September 2016.
Buy the large format book of the series, "Inherit The Dust", on Amazon.

Many of Nick Brandt‘s photographs of African wildlife look like studio portraits, a Richard Avedon perhaps. But they are not, they were taken in situ on African land with a patience born of love, and without a telephoto lens. He used a Pentax 67 ll to photograph the animals and a Mamiya RZ67 Pro II for the onsite images in this series. There is no doubt that his photographs are, in his words, “achieved by one not so simple thing: getting very, very close to the animals.” His photos are exquisite depictions of animals and a way of life we may be on the brink of losing...

British photographer Nick Brandt has been making intimate portraits of East African animals for close to two decades. In that time, many of the places he works have been transformed by rapid development, and the environmental devastation that often comes with it. Now, in a new book and series of international exhibitions is called Inherit the Dust, Brandt attempts to show what habitat destruction looks like by placing giant portraits of animals in landscapes where they used to roam.

If instead of looking for bargains (lots of luck) you are hunting for surprises, there are other lessons to be picked up amid the wide-ranging array of high-priced work for sale. At Edwynn Houk, the importance of scale is emphasized. In “Underpass With Elephants (Lean Back, Your Life Is on Track),” shot last year, the English photographer Nick Brandt hung a life-size print of his portrait of elephants from a highway overpass in Nairobi, under which homeless glue sniffers congregate.

Nick Brandt built lifesized panels depicting Africa’s great creatures and placed them in scenes where they used to roam. The resulting photographs serve as a potent reminder of what poaching, habitat loss and climate change put at stake.

Nick Brandt’s latest work is both gorgeous and disturbing: He applies his stately animal portraiture to a potent caveat about the Earth’s fate. Brandt returns to East Africa, where he’s photographed his trilogy of wildlife-imagery projects in recent years. This time around, he places life-sized panels of great and endangered species—elephants, rhinos, zebras, lions, apes—in locales where the animals once roamed, which are now littered with detritus from factories, dumpsites, quarries, overpasses and other man-made intrusions.

As an ardent conservationist, photographer Nick Brandt's early work showing the majesty of the large animals that once ruled East Africa wasn't enough. Brandt created three gorgeous photo books focused on African animals in danger of extinction: On This Earth (2005), A Shadow Falls (2009) and Across the Ravaged Land (2013). As a result of that work, what he saw, and what he learned, in 2010 he created the Big Life Foundation with conservationist Richard Bonham. Big Life protects more than 2 million acres of the Amboseli-Tsavo-Kilimanjaro ecosystem in East Africa.

In the new photo book Inherit the Dust, photographer Nick Brandt printed large format versions of his photos of endangered animals and built them into the African landscapes where they used to roam—landscapes now transformed by man-made constructions. Brandt aligns the images so seamlessly into the landscape that the animals—elephants, cheetahs, zebras—look like ghosts dwindling between past and present. The striking prints state a painful truth we all know—we are abusing our planet. Click through the indelible images or see the large prints at Edwynn Houk Gallery, where they will be on view until April 30.

Nick Brandt’s portraits of East African wildlife are shot in crisp, metallic black and white, but they capture a dynamic informality in their subjects. It’s as if the creatures Brandt encounters are unaware of his presence and have not had time to arrange themselves at their best. An elephant, ragged ears flapping, shuffles toward the camera, weighed down by broken tusks. A rhinoceros in profile displays a hide covered with nicks and gashes. A buffalo peers into the camera, one of its eyes swollen nearly shut. An ostrich egg, mysteriously abandoned on a mud flat, seems destined to petrify in the light of a distant sunset. Brandt’s photographs, which at first glance can seem static, are in fact suffused with movement and with a sense of the ephemeral quality of life.

The animals in Nick Brandt’s book, Inherit the Dust, which Edwynn Houk Editions published in March, couldn’t look more out of place among the quarries, underpasses, and man-made wastelands where they’ve been photographed. But not too long ago, before they were driven out by humans, those places were their natural habitats. The contrast he draws is striking—both an elegy and an accusingly pointed finger.

Nick Brandt’s new photographic work, Inherit the Dust, is his visual cry of anguish about the looming apocalypse for animals habitats in Africa. If the killing of animals continues at its current pace, the elephants, rhinos, lions and cheetahs will all but disappear in 10 years. “I am embarrassed to use this phrase because it’s so corny and clichéd, but I want to make the world a better place,” he says.

When British-born photographer Nick Brandt first started photographing animals in the East African wild in 2000, he didn't realize how quickly the region would be transformed. Their disappearing habitats inspired his latest series, "Inherit the Dust." Mr. Brandt and a team of over 20 crew members placed life-size photos of giraffes, elephants and other animals in their former stomping grounds—places that had become factories, quarries and garbage dumps. Mr. Brandt captured the resulting landscape, often with gray skies overhead, creating an evocative portrait of change and loss.

Nick Brandt has been photographing the grandeur of East Africa's stoic wildlife since 2001, but during his many trips he has observed a troubling pattern:

"The destruction of the natural world was occurring at an alarming rate — faster than my already pessimistic imagination could have anticipated," Brandt said from his studio in the Santa Monica Mountains.

His forthcoming series of photos, "Inherit the Dust," was conceived as his elegy to Africa's natural world. He came up with the idea of photographing displaced animals in places where just three years earlier they used to roam — but no longer can because of rapid urban sprawl. Factories, garbage dumps and quarries now stand where elephants, lions, rhinos and cheetahs once lived.